We develop an algorithm for finding and kinematically tracking multiple people in long sequences. Our basic assumption is that people tend to take on certain canonical poses, even when performing unusual activities like throwing a baseball or figure skating. We create a fully automatic system that works in three stages. First, it detects people in lateral walking poses. The system then builds a discriminitive appearance model for each limb from the walking detections; we assume the features that discriminate a person in one frame will discriminate the person in other frames. Finally, the system uses the limb models in a pictorial structure framework, detecting figures in unrestricted poses in both previous and successive frames. We have run our tracker on hundreds of thousands of frames, and present and apply a methodology for evaluating tracking on such a large scale. We test our tracker on real sequences including a feature-length film, an hour of footage from a public park, and various sports sequences. We find that we can quite accurately automatically find and track multiple people interacting with each other while performing fast and unusual motions.
Ramanan, D., Forsyth, D. A., Zisserman, A. "Strike a Pose: Tracking People by Finding Stylized Poses." Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Diego, CA, June 2005. [pdf]
Ramanan, D., Forsyth, D. A., Zisserman, A. " Tracking People by Learning their Appearance" IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI). Jan 2007. [pdf]
The following movies are DIVX encoded.
Lola Run' shot with
||'Run Lola Run' shot with changing background||'Run Lola Run' shot with fast movement, scale change, and camera motion|
| Michelle Kwan's 1998
Olympic Performance (50 MB)
|| Pitch from 2002 World Series